Abbott reshapes the landscape

Despite tough decisions that have broken the political custom of handing money to companies to shore up loss-making jobs, the weekend barrage of electoral indicators suggests the Abbott government continues to politically reshape the nation. In the two states with the nation’s highest unemployment, voters swung to Liberal leaders who have echoed
Tony Abbott
’s message of harnessing business to drive economic growth. In Tasmania,
Will Hodgman
delivered a thumping win over Labor and the Greens, mirroring the voters’ rejection of the federal alliance between Gillard’s Labor and the Greens. In South Australia, novice Liberal leader
Steven Marshall
scored a telling 52.5 per cent two-party preferred majority of the popular vote, despite Labor’s attacks on the federal Coalition over the pending shutdown of car making in the state. Yet Labor’s ­superior on-the-ground political skills means the result hangs in the balance and may depend on two independents. While that may deprive Mr Abbott of coast-to-coast Liberal or Coalition governments, it confirms the national swing.

Moreover, Monday’s Australian Financial Review/Nielsen poll shows the Coalition has largely maintained its national standing among voters despite the fallout from Toyota’s decision to close its car manufacturing operations, Mr Abbott’s refusal to hand out $25 million of taxpayers’ money to fruit canner SPC Ardmona and his rejection of Qantas’s plea for a government debt guarantee in favour of lifting foreign ownership restrictions on the national carrier. Depending on how voter preferences are distributed, the Coalition either leads Labor 51-49 or trails it 49-51 on a two-party preferred basis. Labor may seek solace from the fall in the Coalition’s poll position since the September election: as Nielsen research director John Stirton writes on Monday, Mr Abbott’s government has performed worse on this count than any other new government in its first six months in the past 40 years. But the Financial Review judges that this measure, on its own, understates the extent of Mr Abbott’s political momentum. At the September election, the Coalition still held its most potent ace – the electorate’s determination to get rid of a shambolic Labor government controlled by union-dominated factional warlords, the influence of the Greens and the independent powerbrokers. More fundamentally, however, Mr Abbott has been voted into power as ­Australia passes a peak in national prosperity thanks to the luck of our China boom. But a sweep of difficult decisions will be needed to preserve, yet alone improve, this prosperity. It is understandable that voters are not cheering this prospect. Yet they are coming round, perhaps grudgingly, to accepting this and the political leadership that is showing the way.

A shift in the policy landscape

Moreover, Mr Abbott and Treasurer
Joe Hockey
are clearly winning the national policy debate, leaving Labor leader
Bill Shorten
retreating into tired protectionist oppositionism that in no way leads towards a platform for regeneration and re-election. The results of specific policy issues put to voters in the Nielsen poll confirm how the policy landscape is shifting. Only one in five voters supports a government debt guarantee for Qantas, less than the nearly one in three who back lifting ­foreign ownership restrictions on the airline. A clear majority of voters agree that the government needs to reduce the cost of Medicare; 52 per cent back means-testing it; and just as many voters support a $6 co-payment for GP visits as oppose it.

But the massive challenge confronting the Coalition’s political and policy momentum is that, while voters clearly put a ­priority on returning the budget to surplus, they put even more importance on job growth. Mr Abbott and Mr Hockey now must convince Australians of the truth: that a growing ­economy, more jobs and higher wages will all be at risk until the government’s finances are brought back under control – and that this will require government largesse to be scaled back.